“I made contact with Anatoly Kijé.”
“Did his goons slip a bag over your head and drop you at Deux Magots?”
“Even better. He met me alone on the banks of the Seine. Just me and an old KGB
warhorse. Isn’t that cool? Like walking into a le Carré novel.”
Nikki drew the picture in her mind and smiled. “I’m warming up to this.”
“Just wait. First off, Anatoly ID’d the doctor in Joe Flynn’s old photos. Fran?
ois Sisson. Turns out Sisson was a real doctor over here until he became one of the
operatives in Tyler Wynn’s old CIA network. Ready for this? Fran?ois Sisson turned
up on a slab in a Paris morgue the day after helping Wynn play his death scene for
us.”
“Poison?”
“Let’s call it lead poisoning. One slug behind his ear.”
“I’m still waiting for the good news,” she said. “Sounds to me like you got your
George Smiley jollies then hit a dead end.”
“In Paris, yes. But things are a bit different down here in Nice.”
Heat looked at her watch; it would be just past noon in France. “What the hell are
you doing in Nice?”
“Talking to you from my room at the Hotel Negresco. Want to know why? Because I
just came from a meeting at a beach club called Castel Plage. It’s up the Promenade
des Anglais between here and Le Chateau. By the way, that’s French for—”
“Rook, I know what chateau is French for. Spit it out.”
“OK, you ready for this? I just had brunch with none other than your elusive Syrian
security attaché, Fariq Kuzbari.”
Nikki set her pen down and just listened. Rook explained that, after his meeting by
the Seine, he hopped the overnight high-speed train to Nice, where the Syrian
security man had agreed to meet him. He dropped his bag at the Negresco and then
walked the promenade along the bay to the Castel Plage, where Kuzbari waited for him
at a secluded table on the beachside patio. “You know, Fariq’s a lot nicer guy
when his men aren’t holding guns on you.”
“Rook.”
“Sorry.” He paused and, in the background, she heard the outdoor sounds of Nice:
seabirds; motor bikes; a cruise ship’s horn. She wished she were there. “Kuzbari
told me that your mother was not spying on him while she was tutoring his kids.”
“And you just believe that?”
“I’m only telling you what the man said, and the man said if anyone would know he
was being spied on, it would be he. But Kuzbari did tell me something, and it’s
big. Remember that week the PI said your mom spent at that conference center in the
Berkshires with Kuzbari and his family?”
Nikki remembered it very well from Joe Flynn’s 1999 surveillance report. And
recently, when the Syrian and his security goons accosted her on the street in SoHo,
she made sure to ask him about it. “I remember Kuzbari was more concerned about
denying any hanky-panky. What did he tell you?”
“He said he went to the Berkshires for a symposium on limiting weapons of mass
destruction, and that when your mom wasn’t giving his kids piano lessons, she was
spending an inordinate amount of time with another attendee.”
Heat picked up her pen again. “Who?”
“Dr. Ari Weiss.”
A jolt of adrenaline shot through Heat. Wide awake now, she paced her living room
floor. “Remember that name?” asked Rook. She did. Of course it lived in her notes
from a few weeks ago, but like most things she took down, the facts were burnished
in her memory, and the movement of pen across paper only helped her memorialize
them.
Right before her murder, Ari Weiss had been the houseguest of another prominent
family her mother tutored. Nikki had assumed her mom was spying on them, but Rook’s
information cast things in an entirely different light. It’s possible her mother
had worked her way into that home so she could snoop on the houseguest, Ari. “This
is big,” she said.